Dear Friends:
I would like to share something really exciting with you.
In meetings this past week with two successful businessmen, these individuals renewed their significant financial support to DeLaSalle, but they also offered something more.
They each told me separately that they would like to be more involved in helping our students on a personal level. They told me about a scholarship program that helps high school graduates from rural areas with their college tuition and book costs. When I told them that many of our students also want to go to college but needed jobs first, they agreed to help us with job placement and technical training for our graduates in addition to helping with eventual college costs. I was amazed and thrilled to hear this!
But I was even more touched because of another, seemingly unconnected event from this past week: the death of an old friend.
As I had reflected later on what this old friend had done for me at a vulnerable time in my life, I saw that there now might be a deeper meaning in what I wanted to do. Here’s why.
You see, my friend, Monsignor George Tracy, helped me with several important steps in my life after I first came to Kansas City from Delaware about 36 years ago.
We were each discerning a call to priesthood.
I was 21 years old, and fresh out of college. George was 38 and a hopeless academic.
Upon his arrival in Kansas City, George went to work at Rockhurst College as a professor of philosophy and theology. I went to work in the local jail as a correctional officer.
I had a burning desire to change the world, and I had determined that prison was the best place to begin my campaign for transformation. But instead of transforming the world, I found my own life being transformed, to a significant extent through my friendship with George.
Besides teaching, George was finalizing his doctoral dissertation. But he still found time to become my friend, as well as my mentor and personal advocate. He saw in me something that I could not see at the time. He recognized my need for academic challenge, and advised me to enter graduate school as soon as possible to refine my thinking and to pursue the study of criminal justice.
On his own, he visited the campus of a prestigious eastern university that had just established a graduate program in criminal justice. He had just “happened to be in the area”, as he told me later! Upon his hearty recommendation, the acting chair of the department suddenly called me to offer me a graduate fellowship for the following school term that would underwrite nearly all of the costs of my study.
In an even more auspicious act, George recognized that I was likely not being called to priesthood and celibacy, but that my true calling was to be married. He introduced me to my future wife just three months before I left Kansas City in 1974 for graduate school.
George then served as best man at my wedding, and eight years (and four Dougherty children) later, Karol and I reciprocated by attending Father Tracy’s ordination in Washington in 1984. By then, I was the executive director at DeLaSalle, struggling to keep the doors open due to the severe economic crisis in the country at that time. It was the last time I ever saw George, but I kept up with him through reading of his great accomplishments (see the picture at the top of this page of him with some of his “other” friends!). He truly lived a blessed life.
In just the way that George personally helped me, I’d like to join with the businessmen who offered their help this week to similarly help our students. I would like to introduce them soon to a new mentoring group for our male students that started this past spring at DeLaSalle. It is being led by Everett Curry, a retired government official who also wants to be personally involved in helping our students. In fact, Everett has already organized a group of twenty-five like-minded men who have met with our male students several times last spring, and who are ready to start their work with us again this fall.
If these two groups of men can work with our students to motivate them to stay in school and to provide them with a viable job upon graduation, then I know we will have more graduates and more of our young people going on to college. Now that’s exciting, isn’t it?
Just like George went “out of his way” to “open doors” for me, I would like to “open doors” for our own students.
One way this could work would be that these successful men (and later women) would now return the success they have earned by helping our students. These friends (or mentors) would get to know one or two of our students about to graduate, and help them find a job or gain admission to a job training program (or even college) after they graduate. In return, the students will have to commit to changing their life and attitudes even more than they have already done. They would have to begin preparing for a career and college right away instead of waiting until they graduate. If we can find sixty volunteers for the sixty graduates we anticipate having in May 2010, we could accelerate the development of our students far more than we have ever been able to do before. And not only would we be able to simply graduate sixty (or more) students this school year, we could build a new and positive culture of opportunity for young people for life long success!
What do you think? Would you be willing to join me and others in this exciting development?
All it takes is someone who will believe in a young person, and then to “open a door” or two! Monsignor Tracy did this for me, and now I’d like that for our students.
This will be the most exciting thing I have done in my thirty year career at DeLaSalle, and I hope you will join me! I guarantee you that someone will remember you as I now remember George: a cherished friend at a critical point in my life, who transformed me in ways I never expected.
Jim
I would like to share something really exciting with you.
In meetings this past week with two successful businessmen, these individuals renewed their significant financial support to DeLaSalle, but they also offered something more.
They each told me separately that they would like to be more involved in helping our students on a personal level. They told me about a scholarship program that helps high school graduates from rural areas with their college tuition and book costs. When I told them that many of our students also want to go to college but needed jobs first, they agreed to help us with job placement and technical training for our graduates in addition to helping with eventual college costs. I was amazed and thrilled to hear this!
But I was even more touched because of another, seemingly unconnected event from this past week: the death of an old friend.
As I had reflected later on what this old friend had done for me at a vulnerable time in my life, I saw that there now might be a deeper meaning in what I wanted to do. Here’s why.
You see, my friend, Monsignor George Tracy, helped me with several important steps in my life after I first came to Kansas City from Delaware about 36 years ago.
We were each discerning a call to priesthood.
I was 21 years old, and fresh out of college. George was 38 and a hopeless academic.
Upon his arrival in Kansas City, George went to work at Rockhurst College as a professor of philosophy and theology. I went to work in the local jail as a correctional officer.
I had a burning desire to change the world, and I had determined that prison was the best place to begin my campaign for transformation. But instead of transforming the world, I found my own life being transformed, to a significant extent through my friendship with George.
Besides teaching, George was finalizing his doctoral dissertation. But he still found time to become my friend, as well as my mentor and personal advocate. He saw in me something that I could not see at the time. He recognized my need for academic challenge, and advised me to enter graduate school as soon as possible to refine my thinking and to pursue the study of criminal justice.
On his own, he visited the campus of a prestigious eastern university that had just established a graduate program in criminal justice. He had just “happened to be in the area”, as he told me later! Upon his hearty recommendation, the acting chair of the department suddenly called me to offer me a graduate fellowship for the following school term that would underwrite nearly all of the costs of my study.
In an even more auspicious act, George recognized that I was likely not being called to priesthood and celibacy, but that my true calling was to be married. He introduced me to my future wife just three months before I left Kansas City in 1974 for graduate school.
George then served as best man at my wedding, and eight years (and four Dougherty children) later, Karol and I reciprocated by attending Father Tracy’s ordination in Washington in 1984. By then, I was the executive director at DeLaSalle, struggling to keep the doors open due to the severe economic crisis in the country at that time. It was the last time I ever saw George, but I kept up with him through reading of his great accomplishments (see the picture at the top of this page of him with some of his “other” friends!). He truly lived a blessed life.
In just the way that George personally helped me, I’d like to join with the businessmen who offered their help this week to similarly help our students. I would like to introduce them soon to a new mentoring group for our male students that started this past spring at DeLaSalle. It is being led by Everett Curry, a retired government official who also wants to be personally involved in helping our students. In fact, Everett has already organized a group of twenty-five like-minded men who have met with our male students several times last spring, and who are ready to start their work with us again this fall.
If these two groups of men can work with our students to motivate them to stay in school and to provide them with a viable job upon graduation, then I know we will have more graduates and more of our young people going on to college. Now that’s exciting, isn’t it?
Just like George went “out of his way” to “open doors” for me, I would like to “open doors” for our own students.
One way this could work would be that these successful men (and later women) would now return the success they have earned by helping our students. These friends (or mentors) would get to know one or two of our students about to graduate, and help them find a job or gain admission to a job training program (or even college) after they graduate. In return, the students will have to commit to changing their life and attitudes even more than they have already done. They would have to begin preparing for a career and college right away instead of waiting until they graduate. If we can find sixty volunteers for the sixty graduates we anticipate having in May 2010, we could accelerate the development of our students far more than we have ever been able to do before. And not only would we be able to simply graduate sixty (or more) students this school year, we could build a new and positive culture of opportunity for young people for life long success!
What do you think? Would you be willing to join me and others in this exciting development?
All it takes is someone who will believe in a young person, and then to “open a door” or two! Monsignor Tracy did this for me, and now I’d like that for our students.
This will be the most exciting thing I have done in my thirty year career at DeLaSalle, and I hope you will join me! I guarantee you that someone will remember you as I now remember George: a cherished friend at a critical point in my life, who transformed me in ways I never expected.
Jim
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